FNP 51
Page 5

 our first dates together in 1954. Well, that's the first time we were able to leave the house
 together. Neither one of us had a driving license at that time, so I took one of my
 turpentine wagons-it's called a hoover wagon, it's with rubber wheels on it-and one of
 my [turpentine] mules that we used in the woods. So we started off dating in a mule and
 wagon. We had one date by ourselves, and from then on, we had a flock of our friends
 with us, and we'd go out. You know, back then, we'd just load up in that wagon, and
 we'd go off somewhere or another and build up a fire and eat hot dogs. She played one of
 these little ukeleles, and there [were] one or two others in the group that played one little
 old instrument or another, or we'd beat on a can with a stick. The old mule was named
 Smokie, and he got to learn to love hot dogs. He was the only hot dog-eating mule I'd
 ever seen.

P: You ultimately finished high school when you were eighteen? You finished high school
 in 1957, is that right?

G: I finished it in 1957. Well, my daddy's politics, he must have had something pretty heavy
 on the superintendent, and my wife slipping me notes, got me out of high school. So I
 graduated [from] high school, got a diploma at the last minute and graduated with my
 wife in 1957 and then went off to school, to college. I was captain of my football team
 and ran track in high school, so I went to South Georgia to play football up there. That is
 when Bobby Bowden [head football coach, Florida State University Seminoles] and
 Vince Gibson [were] coaching football at South Georgia. I played football up there and
 ran the 100-yard dash, took first place for the state of Georgia's junior college in the 100-
 yard dash division. And boxed. I was going into boxing as a career. Then, after that, I
 wanted to go into the funeral business because I had been working in funeral homes in
 Live Oak and got my apprenticeship in mortuary science in Jacksonville at Hartage &
 Sons. But boxing was my favorite. Anyway, I went through the Georgia, Alabama, and
 Florida school systems like I was taking a census, I guess. I spent four years at the
 college here in Madison, which was then North Florida Junior College. It's now North
 Florida Community College. Never did even get an AA [Associate of Arts] degree out of
 it. I failed English seven times in college. I just really wasn't smart enough to make it in
 college.

P: You also studied at one point criminal justice. How did you get into that and why?

G: After I got into the newspaper business, that was back before cameras were that popular
 with the law enforcement, I wound up doing all the photography work for all the various
 branches of law enforcement here and gave them the pictures. So I wound up being able
 to work crime scenes, in the beginning, just from what they told me to do. Then I studied
 it, and we knew what to look for. This was long before, like I said, cameras were so
 available to everybody, before the drug program. The drug program, when they started
 using drug money to buy equipment with, that's when cameras got so popular. Then
 everything got specialized. But, [in] the beginning, I was doing all the crime work. I